Short Synopsis
The Immortalists is the fascinating story of the friendship and extraordinary scientific collaboration between Charles Lindbergh and Nobel Prize-winning surgeon Dr. Alexis Carrel, who shared the goal of finding a scientific path to life without death.

Full Synopsis
The Immortalists is the fascinating story of the friendship and extraordinary scientific collaboration of two prodigious men: Charles Lindbergh, once the most famous person in the world, and Dr. Alexis Carrel, the Nobel Prize winner regarded by many as the most brilliant surgeon who ever lived.

Lindbergh and Carrel met not long after Lindbergh's "victory lap" around the world, which followed his historic solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927. Fueled by their shared goal to find a scientific path to life without death, they spent five years in Carrel's laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, where they secretly built a machine that could keep organs alive outside the bodies that created them. This device was the forerunner of today's artificial heart and heart-lung machine.

Although they obviously failed in their ultimate quest, Lindbergh and Carrel's experiments established them as two of the most ambitious thinkers in modern history, as well as unacknowledged pioneers of biotechnology.

"Outstanding history, superbly told" ---Kevin Baker, author of Strivers Row

"David M. Friedman's The Immortalists reads like riveting historical fiction but raises provocative questions about the shape of the future." ---Ron Rosenbaum, bestselling author of The Shakespeare Wars

"Friedman…makes complex science accessible and serves as an absorbing cautionary tale." ---Publishers Weekly

"A fast-paced, energetic text that reads like a novel.... A captivating study of medical innovation, the fallibility of science and two adventurous minds." ---Kirkus Starred Review

"Fascinating and deeply disturbing. I love this book." ---Simon Winchester, bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman

Kirkus Review